The graph above shows confidence against competence/knowledge (source: slidemodel.com). It shows that someone’s confidence does not grow as his/her competence grows. When learning a new subject, most people’s (everyone’s) confidence about that subject grows to the highest levels with relatively no knowledge. At this peak, people overestimate their abilities. They think they know everything about the matter at hand and can do anything they want. At this level, this person makes a “mount stupid” of him/herself by saying or doing so many wrong things with a lot of confidence. Usually, people with more understanding about the subject know this information is wrong and probably start laughing at this person. These people often take two approaches: they raise their knowledge, or they will stop at that level.

For the first group, the overly-gained confidence will wipe out after a little amount of knowledge. These people understand that they know very little about the matter, and they probably want to increase their knowledge about the subject. This leads to lowering their confidence to a valley at which people will have two approaches: Some of them will leave the subject and never come back, and some of them will love the subject and grow their knowledge about it.

It is obvious that the first group of people will remain with a little amount of knowledge and hurt confidence, while the second group will grow in the subject, and gain more knowledge and confidence over time.

As we know, with the growth of the internet, most people have gained a little confidence in every subject, even if they don’t have any knowledge of it. This could lead to a low level of confidence even below the initial point, causing people to get discouraged, which, usually, leads to the first event. Most of the time, if the valley doesn’t come below the initial point, people will have enough confidence to ride them to the next level.

After they gain enough knowledge, their confidence begins to grow again, this time with much less slope. When this happens, confidence actually comes from the right point: knowledge/competence. After a long time, many hours of work/study, and many mistakes, their confidence goes back to the level of “mount stupid”. It is at this level that they begin to become humble. They have confidence in their competence, but they decide not to show it (off).

This crucial graph is called the Dunning-Kruger effect. It happens to almost everyone, and in almost every subject, like AI. The very talked-about subject these days with the growing usage of ChatGPT and other known AI tools. Everyone is an AI master now (the mount stupids). Before that, everyone was a blockchain master, data analysis master, big data master, internet master, etc.

The point is, everyone will fall into the trap of being a mount stupid, but not everyone needs to remain a mount stupid or even show that they are a mount stupid.

Note to me: When the confidence is over-hyped, notice it, try to remain silent, and gain more knowledge!